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The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

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Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#321

Post by eitland »

bigpeopleareold wrote: post #281
eitland wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> edit: one other thing I have seen, but it doesn't mean it is always spam. All The Words In A Title Are Capitalized - it's something to pay attention to whether it is spam or not. Conventionally, titles are usually not like that in Norwegian. Another big one is that Norwegians like Germans write words together, just one example from one of the stupid ads: "Spesial Reportasje" is a dead giveaway not only because of t…

This reminds me of the facebook group: Bilder i kampen mot særskrivingfeil: https://www.facebook.com/ettord :D (Something like: Pictures in the struggle against mistakes when using spaces between words)

There's also the Norwegian "Astronomer mot orddeling" ("Astronomers against word splitting") that is very open to non-Astronomers as well.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#322

Post by cratermoon »

keyme wrote: post #140

Google search has progressively deteriorated in quality over the last 10 years, to the point where I see it becoming useless in the relatively near future. And it's mainly not even their fault. I've been using Google search for all kinds of research for 15 years. There used to be a time when you could find the answer to pretty much anything. I could find leaked source codes on public FTP servers, links to pirated sof…

Whether or not it's Google's fault depends on how much you attribute the development of the advertising-driving distraction factory internet to Google's business. We can debate whether or not Google was ever really in the search engine business – certainly at one point the search was a useful tool. Today, Google search is a sort of glorified Yellow Pages*. Their main product is selling ads in this Nouveau YP. The results their search engine returns are now heavily skewed towards revenue-generating sites. Such sites may incidentally be informative, but they are generally selling something.

Edit: see this other HN story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27993564

This is not to say that all search results are bought, although of course those are present now, too. But overall Google presumes that whatever the user is searching for, the best result is one where the answer is "buy this thing".

For those search results that don't lead directly to commercial products, the revenue generation is indirect: through the collection of user preferences and activity, Google can refine its search results towards maximizing revenue. At the very least, the result is likely to be a site that has ads, some of which generate revenue directly for Google.

*In the old-fashioned Yellow Pages book, you couldn’t really “search,” but there was an index by category. It had many of the issues inherent in categories, but it didn’t take an expert to find things. Google search eliminates the needs for anyone to understand a taxonomy of businesses.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#323

Post by kkoncevicius »

yetanotheralexn wrote: post #283
kkoncevicius wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google seems to also place less emphasis on search phrases. When searching for exact article names I easily find them on DuckDuckGo, but not on Google. Two recent search-term examples: 1. the scientific worldview needs an update 2. from reproducibility to over reproducibility

Your examples seem to work for me (the second one only if combined with double quotes). Do you have more? https://snipboard.io/PYhNHW.jpg https://snipboard.io/HvRaiE.jpg It would be cool to find datapoints for a proper bug report for Google :)

Well, there is always stuff Google thinks you shouldn't read about. Try these (both are first hit on ddg.gg and nowhere on google):

- Politics Influences the Science of COVID-19

- Ten elements of false covid narrative

- Josh Mitteldorf unthinkable thoughts

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#324

Post by trangus_1985 »

stavros wrote: post #188
trangus_1985 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloudflare is not a public institution. It troubles me that they get to define, draw, and then maintain that line. However, I do agree - privacy unveiling like that should require a judge's order.

But they don't, that's explicitly their stance. There is no line. They host everyone equally. To do the opposite would require drawing a line.

> There is no line

You are missing the point of the complaint, which is that it's a private decision to hold that policy. Maybe it was a bad idea to use the word "line", but the intent still stands unadressed.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#325

Post by eitland »

fogihujy wrote: post #196
porbelm wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I try that search, havfruen is seventh place. NHI and other good results at the top. YMMV a lot with Google results. For me, it's usually great where DDG is kinda crap, but not as bad as... shudder ... bing

With DDG, I found this thread. Google set to Norway as region/language found nothing from havfruen4220.dk, unless I specifically added site:havfruen4220.dk in the search. My guess is that someone at Google reacted.

Just unintentionally confirmed it was still there for me when I searched for Roblox gift cards.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#326

Post by dhosek »

mattwad wrote: post #51
dhosek wrote: post #50

The ones thing I want more than anything from google or DuckDuckGo or anyone really is the ability to give a list of domains and never have their results show up in my searches. I know I can do this on a per search basis but I want it to be a configurable setting.

UBlacklist is a plugin that does this. It's so great to be able to hide all those sites that just cache Git issues and SO posts.

I installed it and it's—ok? For search results where the spam overwhelms the signal (it used to be able to do a decent reverse phone lookup by putting a phone number into Google), you end up with empty pages or mostly empty pages in the search results. Better than nothing, but it really should be a feature from the search engine, not a browser plugin.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#327

Post by nine_k »

avian wrote: post #111
Ueland wrote: post #106

I have some experience on this field. Around two years ago i was a DevOp for the company running Dagbladet, Norways #2 newspaper. One of the things I did was keep an eye on mysterious traffic. I managed to find a huge spam network that set up a proxy service that delivered normal content, but injected "you can win an iPhone!" spam to all users visiting them. Since I was in the position of being able to monitor their…

> We reported the sites to both CF and Google, and to my knowledge, not a single site were removed before the people behind it took it down. As someone that tried reporting spam sites because they were using content scrapped from my website, I'm not surprised. Cloudflare has a policy that they will not stop providing their IP hiding/reverse proxy services to anyone, regardless of complaints. The best they do is forwa…

This is very rational of them. They position themselves as a pipe for "bytes", not "content".

By ignoring the content they serve, they rid themselves of the necessity to analyze and judge what they serve. Not only would this require a brain the size of a planet and the expense of running it, but also would inevitably conflict with someone else's judgments, and bring various PR woes.

They don't analyze the internals of their traffic the way internet backbone providers don't analyze the internals of the traffic they pass around.

I frankly find this position superior: imho it does more good by preventing censorship than harm by serving good-intentioned and bad-intentioned customers alike.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#328

Post by hackbinary »

tlogan wrote: post #264
yosamino wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The best they do is forward your complaint to the owner of the website, who is free to ignore it. Or worse. Since I have no way to know beforehand who I would be dealing with, this is actively dangerous - what if the mobster running this site is having a bad day and choses to retaliate ? Also what a stupid fucking policy that is. Even if you are not legally compelled to block content, what is the point of actively…

I do not think that it is up to Google or CloudFlare to police the internet. If a site is doing something illegal then report it to appropriate gov agency. If gov agency does not anything then get involved into political process to fix that.

If Google, or CF, or whoever are fronting illegal activity with their services, they are absolutely responsible for damages the party they are proxying.

Platforms must be responsible for the content they are hosting, broadcasting, and publishing.

One to one communications between two people exchanging ideas and having a private discussion is different from mass broadcasting.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#329

Post by BizarroLand »

omega3 wrote: post #147
keyme wrote: post #140

Google search has progressively deteriorated in quality over the last 10 years, to the point where I see it becoming useless in the relatively near future. And it's mainly not even their fault. I've been using Google search for all kinds of research for 15 years. There used to be a time when you could find the answer to pretty much anything. I could find leaked source codes on public FTP servers, links to pirated sof…

> And it's mainly not even their fault. It's precisely their fault, they've created an environment that incentivizes low quality, irrelevant content and are actively hostile towards users. Two examples just from top of my head: ignoring the country website, previously if you wanted to search only local news it was very easy to do. Another was ignoring completely the exact phrase search with double brackets.

I'm sure public human SEO manipulation is at least partly to blame. The only thing that is surprising is that it isn't worse than it is. At least the first half page is usually close to what you want.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#330

Post by iratewizard »

hnbad wrote: post #306
iratewizard wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And 8chan, the 4chan alternative where anyone can make and moderate their own board.

Better known for being linked to the Christchurch and El Paso shootings, being the origin of the QAnon movement and having a history of hosting child pornography. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8chan

Facebook, reddit, MySpace and Twitter have all been linked to mass shootings and child pornography. None of these sites condone, enable or remotely desire such content.
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